NYTimes | A broad range of figures in the
Anglosphere’s establishment, including some of Mr. Trump’s most
ostentatious critics today, contributed manure to the soil in which
Trumpism flourishes. Cheered on by the Murdoch press, Tony Blair tried
to deepen Britain and America’s “special relationship” in Iraq. Leaders
of Australia and Canada also eagerly helped with the torture, rendition
and extermination of black and brown brutes.
Not
surprisingly, these chieftains of white settler colonies are fierce
cultural warriors; they are all affiliated with private donors who build
platforms where political correctness, Islam and feminism are
excoriated, the facts of injustice and inequality denied, chests thumped
about a superior but sadly imperiled Western civilization, and
fraternal sympathy extended to Israel, the world’s last active
settler-colonialist project.
Emotional
incontinence rather than style or wit marks such gilded networks of
white power. For the Anglosphere originally forged and united by the
slave trade and colonialism is in terminal crisis today. Whiteness
denoted, as Du Bois wrote, “the ownership of the earth forever and
ever.” But many descendants of the landlords of the earth find
themselves besieged both at home and abroad, their authority as
overlords, policemen and interpreters of the globe increasingly
challenged.
Mr. Trump appears to some of these
powerful but insecure men as an able-bodied defender of the “higher
races.” The Muslim-baiting British Conservative politician Boris Johnson says
that he is “increasingly admiring of Donald Trump.” Mr. Murray, the
British journalist, thinks Mr. Trump is “reminding the West of what is
great about ourselves.” The Canadian YouTube personality Jordan Peterson
claims that his loathing of “identity politics” would have driven him
to vote for Mr. Trump.
Other panicky
white bros not only virulently denounce identity politics and political
correctness — code for historically scorned peoples’ daring to propose
norms about how they are treated; they also proclaim ever more rowdily
that the (white) West was, and is, best. “It is time to make the case
for colonialism again,” Bruce Gilley, a Canadian academic, recently asserted
and promptly shot to martyrdom in the far-right constellation as a
victim of politically correct criticism. Such busy recyclers of Western
supremacism, many of whom uphold a disgraced racial pseudoscience,
remind us that history often repeats itself as intellectual farce.
The
low comedy of charlatanry, however, should not distract us from the
lethal dangers of a wounded and swaggering identity geopolitics. The war
on terror reactivated the 19th century’s imperial archive of racial
knowledge, according to which the swarthy enemy was subhuman, inviting
extreme and lawless violence. The rapid contraction of suffrage rights
witnessed in early-20th-century America is now mimicked by Republican
attempts to disenfranchise nonwhite voters. The Australian lawmaker who recently urged a “final solution” for Muslim immigrants was only slightly out of tune with public debate about immigration in Australia. Hate crimes continue to rise across the United States,
Britain and Canada. More ominously, demographic, economic and political
decline, and the loss of intellectual hegemony, have plunged many
long-term winners of history into a vengeful despair.
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